Intrinsic Fermi-surface contribution to the bulk photovoltaic effect
Lingyuan Gao, Zachariah Addison, E. J. Melé, Andrew M. Rappe
Abstract
We study the Fermi surface contribution to the nonlinear DC photocurrent at quadratic order in a spatially uniform optical field in the ultraclean limit. In addition to shift and injection current, we find that polarized light incident on a metallic system generates an intrinsic contribution to the bulk photovoltaic effect deriving from photoinduced electronic transitions on the Fermi surface. In velocity gauge, this contribution originates in both the coherent band off-diagonal and diagonal parts of the density matrix, describing, respectively, the coherent wave function evolution and the carrier dynamics of an excited population. We derive a formula for the intrinsic Fermi surface contribution for a time-reversal invariant chiral Weyl semimetal illuminated with circularly polarized light. At low frequency, this response is proportional to the frequency of the driving field, with its sign determined by the topological charge of the Weyl nodes and with its magnitude being comparable to the recently discovered quantized circular photogalvanic effect. Our work presents a complete derivation for all contributions to nonlinear DC photocurrent and classifies them according to the polarization of light in the presence and absence of time-reversal symmetry.